What do you think?
Rate this book
Vital Fluid
"Herein lies the danger of the practice..., for if the mesmerist is corrupt of heart, foul of mind, and diseased of soul the vital fluid which he projects will be tainted..." Vital Fluid is inspired by the uncanny performances and fascinating life of John-Ivan Palmer, the top stage hypnotist in America today. Deceptively simple on the surface, delicately complex throughout the subtext, Vital Fluid masterfully merges two parallel story lines distanced by time and culture in this satiric alternate history / modern fantasy exploration. Two rival hypnotists are pitted against each other in an increasingly bizarre series of performances across an absurdly chaotic America; while, woven in like fine silk, a pair of Victorian era mesmerists match mystical wits before the intolerant and intolerable European bourgeoisie.
151 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
20 people want to read
About the author
Tom Bradley
49 books14 followerstombradley.org
Tom received his novelist's calling at the age of nineteen. He climbed into the moonlit mountains around his hometown, where he got an unambiguous vocation with physical symptoms and everything, just like Martin Luther in the electric storm. He fucked permanently off from America in 1985, moved to Red China, and has lurked around the left rim of the Pacific ever since, in a successful search for sinecures that steal virtually no time and absolutely no mental energy from his writing.
Energeticum / Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion was released in 2017 by MadHat Press. The same company published a blank verse epic, fully illustrated, called Useful Despair as Taught to the Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch. Guernica Editions brought out another blank verse epic, Injuring Eternity: a Künstlerroman in Twenty-Six Cantos. Still another blank verse epic, called Nagasaki Soul Huffer: a Manhunt in Fifty-Five Cantos, was released by the great Swedish publisher-film studio, Trapart.
Tom has published thirty-six volumes of poetry, fiction, essays and screenplays with houses in England, Canada and the USA. Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor’s Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Series. 3:AM Magazine in Paris gave him their Nonfiction Book of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009, and one of his latest graphic novels is excerpted in the &Now Award Anthology.
Tom's prose shares the legendary pages of London's AMBIT Magazine with J.G. Ballard and Ralph Steadman. His journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Salon.com, and are frequently featured in Arts & Letters Daily. Denis Dutton, editor of the site (“among the most influential media personalities in the world,” according to Time Magazine), wrote as follows:
“Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.”
HTMLGIANT says:
“Tom Bradley has long been known for repeatedly performing, at will, almost offhandedly, a task one would have thought impossible, perhaps magical, in these latter jaded days: the invention of new genres. Andrei Codrescu hailed his quasi-nonfiction opus Fission Among the Fanatics as ‘the first appearance of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it...’ In the field of meta-scholarship, the late Carol Novack described his Epigonesia as ‘that rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus.’ More recently, in his books Family Romance and We’ll See Who Seduces Whom, Bradley has yanked new kinks into the synaesthetic art of ekphrasis. He ‘accepted the challenge posed by stacks of preexisting art’ and wrote a novel and an epic poem, respectively, around them...’”
Reviews and excerpts, a couple hours of recorded readings, plus links to Tom's essays in Salon.com and other such high-tone swanky magazines, are at tombradley.org
Tom received his novelist's calling at the age of nineteen. He climbed into the moonlit mountains around his hometown, where he got an unambiguous vocation with physical symptoms and everything, just like Martin Luther in the electric storm. He fucked permanently off from America in 1985, moved to Red China, and has lurked around the left rim of the Pacific ever since, in a successful search for sinecures that steal virtually no time and absolutely no mental energy from his writing.
Energeticum / Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion was released in 2017 by MadHat Press. The same company published a blank verse epic, fully illustrated, called Useful Despair as Taught to the Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch. Guernica Editions brought out another blank verse epic, Injuring Eternity: a Künstlerroman in Twenty-Six Cantos. Still another blank verse epic, called Nagasaki Soul Huffer: a Manhunt in Fifty-Five Cantos, was released by the great Swedish publisher-film studio, Trapart.
Tom has published thirty-six volumes of poetry, fiction, essays and screenplays with houses in England, Canada and the USA. Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor’s Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Series. 3:AM Magazine in Paris gave him their Nonfiction Book of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009, and one of his latest graphic novels is excerpted in the &Now Award Anthology.
Tom's prose shares the legendary pages of London's AMBIT Magazine with J.G. Ballard and Ralph Steadman. His journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Salon.com, and are frequently featured in Arts & Letters Daily. Denis Dutton, editor of the site (“among the most influential media personalities in the world,” according to Time Magazine), wrote as follows:
“Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.”
HTMLGIANT says:
“Tom Bradley has long been known for repeatedly performing, at will, almost offhandedly, a task one would have thought impossible, perhaps magical, in these latter jaded days: the invention of new genres. Andrei Codrescu hailed his quasi-nonfiction opus Fission Among the Fanatics as ‘the first appearance of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it...’ In the field of meta-scholarship, the late Carol Novack described his Epigonesia as ‘that rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus.’ More recently, in his books Family Romance and We’ll See Who Seduces Whom, Bradley has yanked new kinks into the synaesthetic art of ekphrasis. He ‘accepted the challenge posed by stacks of preexisting art’ and wrote a novel and an epic poem, respectively, around them...’”
Reviews and excerpts, a couple hours of recorded readings, plus links to Tom's essays in Salon.com and other such high-tone swanky magazines, are at tombradley.org
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 12, 2010
In 1779 Anton Mesmer proposed everything in the universe influenced everything else, and this was accomplished through “fluid universally diffused.” It is this premise that is the driving influence of Tom Bradley’s 2009 novel, Vital Fluid.
The story follows two sets of rival hypnotists; Phil Deacon, scion of an old-style showbiz family, and his nemesis, Simon Magus, who occupy center stage in our century. Their story is paralleled by the tale of historical mesmerist Charles LaFontaine, and his erstwhile rival, Baron Dupotet. Both sets of hypnotists are the yin and yang of one another — Phil is light, and Simon is dark — LaFontaine is famed and kind, while Dupotet is despised and cruel.
Bradley’s writing is deceptively easy, the plot whisking you through the pages with distractions and legerdemain worthy of the hypnotists of which he writes. But more than that, it is a fine satire of modern America, Christian fundamentalism, modern notions of what passes for entertainment, and the nature of professional rivalry and envy.
At times his characters and his prose are foul-mouthed and disturbing — a few of his characters are caricatures, but most of the time, you feel they are real people, even if you only spot them in the crowd. And there are hundreds of acute moments of fine observation and touching humanity, such as this scene at a native reservation in the desert:
Vital Fluid CoverEvidence of the vital fluid is all around the characters of Phil and LaFontaine, but harder to spot with Simon, and virtually invisible near the malignant presence of Dupotet.
In history, Mesmer’s proposition was first proved unscientific by a French Royal Commission in 1784, and then parodied by Romantic writers in the early part of the next century. But here in the new millennium, at the end of Bradley’s book, you’ll discover that the vital fluid has always been with us, and with any luck, always will be.
You’ll just have to read it to see how.
Buy it at the publisher’s website.
The story follows two sets of rival hypnotists; Phil Deacon, scion of an old-style showbiz family, and his nemesis, Simon Magus, who occupy center stage in our century. Their story is paralleled by the tale of historical mesmerist Charles LaFontaine, and his erstwhile rival, Baron Dupotet. Both sets of hypnotists are the yin and yang of one another — Phil is light, and Simon is dark — LaFontaine is famed and kind, while Dupotet is despised and cruel.
Bradley’s writing is deceptively easy, the plot whisking you through the pages with distractions and legerdemain worthy of the hypnotists of which he writes. But more than that, it is a fine satire of modern America, Christian fundamentalism, modern notions of what passes for entertainment, and the nature of professional rivalry and envy.
At times his characters and his prose are foul-mouthed and disturbing — a few of his characters are caricatures, but most of the time, you feel they are real people, even if you only spot them in the crowd. And there are hundreds of acute moments of fine observation and touching humanity, such as this scene at a native reservation in the desert:
“An amazingly beautiful girl of about fourteen walks by. She trusts the Medicine Man enough to try out what promises, someday, to be a formidable set of flirtatious skills. She eyes him sidelong and makes tentative little motions with her slender hips.
“The Medicine Man tilts his head and sighs, as if overwhelmed with adoration. His knees start to wobble comically and he grabs his chest. She breaks into girlish giggles and scampers off.”
Vital Fluid CoverEvidence of the vital fluid is all around the characters of Phil and LaFontaine, but harder to spot with Simon, and virtually invisible near the malignant presence of Dupotet.
In history, Mesmer’s proposition was first proved unscientific by a French Royal Commission in 1784, and then parodied by Romantic writers in the early part of the next century. But here in the new millennium, at the end of Bradley’s book, you’ll discover that the vital fluid has always been with us, and with any luck, always will be.
You’ll just have to read it to see how.
Buy it at the publisher’s website.
August 7, 2010
Bradley's unfettered imagination and exuberant, roller coaster writing style tickle the reader; he also has something to say about our mad, mad world. What a relief from novel business as usual.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews